20 Years of Liquid and Countless “Next Big Things”
Twenty years is a long time in marketing. Long enough to see a video filmed in someone’s kitchen outperform a campaign with three rounds of revisions. Long enough to build separate mobile websites only to bring them back together, ultimately for us to wonder how much of the customer journey even happens on a website at all.
As Liquid Marketing celebrates its 20th anniversary, I’ve been looking back at the trends that shaped our industry and the work we do. Some became everyday expectations. Others left us with abandoned accounts.
Here are 20 I thought worth revisiting, whether they’re still in your marketing plan or buried in your browser history.
1. Adobe Flash
For a while, Flash made the internet feel like it had finally discovered caffeine.
Websites moved. Buttons made noises. Intros played whether anyone asked for them or not. Designers got ambitious and load times got questionable.
Flash eventually faded, but the appetite it created stuck around. People still expect digital experiences to feel interactive, expressive, and worth paying attention to.
We just expect them to load now.
2. Facebook Brand Pages
Facebook gave brands something the internet had not really offered before: a public space where companies and customers could regularly talk to each other.
That opened the door to community building, real-time feedback, and social customer service.
The platform has changed many times since then, and reach now requires much more strategy, budget, and patience. Still, Facebook Brand Pages helped turn social media from a place brands watched into a place they actively participated.
3. Mobile (m.) Sites
The arrival of mobile websites forced brands to accept a slightly uncomfortable truth: people were going to visit from tiny screens whether the experience was ready or not.
So businesses built separate mobile sites with simplified navigation, trimmed content, and buttons large enough for human thumbs.
Those early efforts were imperfect, but they changed how marketers thought about access and convenience. The website was no longer tied to a place or device.
4. Foursquare
Remember when, for a brief, highly competitive moment, checking in at a coffee shop could make you its mayor?
Foursquare turned physical locations into social experiences, giving people points, badges, recommendations, and a reason to broadcast exactly where they were having lunch.
For marketers, it made location data feel playful and immediately useful. Businesses could reward visits, encourage loyalty, and reach people based on where they actually went.
The badges faded, but the bigger idea stuck: Location could shape the message, the offer, and the moment someone received it.
5. QR Codes
QR codes arrived, disappeared into the marketing storage closet, and then made one of the strongest comebacks of the last 20 years.
Early on, they often required a separate app and appeared on everything whether they added value or not.
Then smartphone cameras learned how to scan them, contactless experiences became essential, and suddenly the little black-and-white squares were useful again.
Now they connect physical materials to digital experiences in seconds. Menus, packaging, events, payments, and more all gained a very convenient shortcut.
Sometimes a trend is not wrong. It is simply very early.
6. Google+
There was a time when every brand strategy included a serious conversation about Google+.
The platform introduced useful ideas like Circles for audience grouping and Hangouts for live video. It also benefited from a pretty compelling sales pitch: Google probably mattered to your visibility on Google.
Ultimately, users never adopted it at the scale needed to sustain a major social network, but it gave marketers another chance to learn that strategy should come before account creation.
7. Responsive Design
Separate desktop and mobile websites worked until the number of screen sizes started multiplying like rabbits.
Responsive design gave us a smarter answer. One website could adjust its layout, images, navigation, and content to fit whatever device someone happened to be using.
That changed web design from creating a handful of fixed pages to building flexible systems.
Today, responsiveness feels like a basic expectation. At the time, it was a major shift in how designers, developers, and marketers planned digital experiences.
8. Content Marketing
At its core, content marketing gave brands permission to do more than promote products.
They could answer questions, explain complicated topics, share useful ideas, and build trust before anyone was ready to buy. Blogs, guides, videos, podcasts, and newsletters became central parts of the marketing plan.
Then came the content explosion. More brands published more things more often, and simply producing content stopped being enough. (Not to get into the AI slop that followed.)
But the strongest work still follows the original idea: Understand what people care about, create something genuinely useful, and give them a reason to remember who made it.
9. Infographics
For a while, every complicated idea seemed one illustrated timeline away from becoming completely understandable.
Infographics combined data, design, and storytelling in a format built for sharing. They helped brands turn dense information into something people could scan, save, and pass along.
Naturally, the internet eventually produced far too many of them. Some became less “information graphic” and more “very tall collection of facts.”
Still, the format proved something important. Good visual communication can make complex ideas easier to grasp and much harder to ignore.
10. Snapchat
Snapchat changed social media by making content temporary.
That lower-stakes format encouraged a more casual style, and brands had to learn how to communicate without making every post feel like a tiny press release.
Stories, augmented-reality lenses, vertical video, and direct camera-based creation all grew from that behavior.
And now its lasting impact is everywhere, from reshaping what people expect social content to look and feel like to “What’s your Snap?” becoming a perfectly normal way to flirt.
11. Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising brought automation to the process of buying digital media.
Instead of negotiating every placement individually, advertisers could use data and technology to bid on impressions in real time. That created more scale, faster optimization, and much more precise targeting.
It also created a fresh collection of acronyms, dashboards, intermediaries, and brand-safety questions.
The technology has evolved significantly, but the promise remains compelling: reach the right audience, in the right context, at the right moment, without buying half the internet to get there.
12. Homepage Hero Video
As internet speeds improved, website homepages began moving.
Large hero videos gave brands a way to create atmosphere, show products in action, and tell a story before someone scrolled or clicked. When done well, they could make a digital experience feel immediate and immersive. (They could also slow load times and struggle across devices.)
The cinematic homepage had its moment. Today, brands are often better served by letting speed, clarity, and usability take the lead.
13. Location-Based Marketing
Once mobile devices could reliably understand where people were, location became a powerful marketing signal.
Restaurants could reach people nearby. Retailers could promote local inventory. Search results could prioritize the closest option. Campaigns could change by market, region, or even neighborhood.
That made marketing more relevant, but it also raised the bar for responsible data use.
The strongest location strategies feel natural because they answer an immediate need. They help someone find, choose, visit, or act.
The sweet spot? Useful enough to notice and subtle enough not to.
14. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing grew from a simple idea: people often trust people more than they trust brands.
Creators built loyal audiences around fashion, food, parenting, gaming, business, and nearly every interest imaginable. Brands gained access to those communities through partnerships that could feel more personal than traditional advertising.
The field has matured since then. Strong influencer marketing depends less on celebrity and more on credibility, audience fit, and a partnership that makes sense to everyone watching.
15. Livestreaming
Livestreaming made “happening now” a full marketing format.
Brands could broadcast events, product launches, interviews, demonstrations, and behind-the-scenes moments directly to an audience.
The live setting created urgency and interaction that edited video could not fully replicate. It also removed the comfort of fixing everything in post, but that unpredictability is part of the appeal.
It never became the default format for every brand, but it found a lasting home in niches built around community, access, and real-time participation.
16. Chatbots
Chatbots promised to answer customer questions at any hour without requiring a human to live inside the website.
Early versions handled simple tasks like routing inquiries, collecting information, recommending products, and answering frequently asked questions. Some were genuinely helpful. Others became elaborate ways to avoid showing a phone number.
The technology has improved dramatically, but the basic standard has not: A chatbot should make it easier to get somewhere, solve something, or reach the right person. (Cause people can tell when it is mostly there to keep them busy.)
17. Voice Search
When people began talking to phones, speakers, cars, and televisions, search behavior became more conversational.
Queries got longer. Local intent became especially important. Clear answers, structured information, and natural language mattered more.
Voice search never replaced typing, but it expanded the number of places and moments where people could look for help.
It also reminded marketers that customers do not think in keyword lists. They ask questions, describe problems, and occasionally shout at a device from across the kitchen.
18. TikTok
TikTok proved that a video filmed in someone’s kitchen could outperform a campaign with three rounds of approvals. A single video could reach a massive audience based on interest and engagement rather than an established follower count. That gave creators and brands a remarkably open path to visibility.
It also accelerated trends, shortened production cycles, and made authenticity a widely used word with a loose definition.
At the end of the day, the best TikTok marketing understands the culture, contributes something worthwhile, and most importantly, knows when to leave a trend alone.
19. Generative AI (GenAI)
*Sigh*
Generative AI didn’t exactly ease its way into marketing.
Almost overnight, teams could use it to draft, summarize, brainstorm, analyze, personalize, prototype, and automate pieces of the work. That created enormous potential and an equally enormous supply of mediocre captions.
The technology is changing quickly, but its value still depends on the thinking around it.
Good inputs matter. Judgment matters. Original ideas matter. Knowing when the answer is confidently wrong matters quite a bit.
The future of the work may involve more AI, but it will still depend on human judgment to keep it from becoming a sea of competent mush.
20. AI Search
For years, search marketing focused heavily on rankings, clicks, and the results page.
AI search is changing that experience. A single prompt can trigger multiple searches, pull from many sources, and produce one direct response. People may discover, compare, and narrow their options before visiting a website at all.
That creates new questions for marketers. What does the AI know about the brand? Which sources does it trust? Is the company clear, credible, and easy to understand across the web? (As luck would have it, we spend a lot of time helping brands figure that out.)
The results page may no longer be the whole story, but showing up clearly still matters.
Hindsight’s 20/20
Many of these trends left something behind, even when the platform or format itself faded. They changed what people expected and gave marketers new ways to meet those expectations.
In looking back, I’m reminded how much of our work involves deciding what to do with something new. Does it make sense for the brand? Will it help the customer? What will it take to do it well? Those questions have held up pretty well, even as the answers keep changing.
Here’s to the next 20 years of Liquid Marketing and the “next big things” we’ll get to figure out.
If you’re deciding which marketing trends deserve a place in your plan, talk to our team about your next move.